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posted by martyb on Monday November 20 2017, @03:49PM   Printer-friendly
from the somebody-HAS-been-watching-you dept.

A Pentagon contractor left a vast archive of social-media posts on a publicly accessible Amazon account in what appears to be a military-sponsored intelligence-gathering operation that targeted people in the US and other parts of the world.

The three cloud-based storage buckets contained at least 1.8 billion scraped online posts spanning eight years, researchers from security firm UpGuard's Cyber Risk Team said in a blog post published Friday. The cache included many posts that appeared to be benign, and in many cases those involved from people in the US, a finding that raises privacy and civil-liberties questions. Facebook was one of the sites that originally hosted the scraped content. Other venues included soccer discussion groups and video game forums. Topics in the scraped content were extremely wide ranging and included Arabic language posts mocking ISIS and Pashto language comments made on the official Facebook page of Pakistani politician Imran Khan.

[...] In Friday's post, UpGuard analyst Dan O'Sullivan wrote:

Massive in scale, it is difficult to state exactly how or why these particular posts were collected over the course of almost a decade. Given the enormous size of these data stores, a cursory search reveals a number of foreign-sourced posts that either appear entirely benign, with no apparent ties to areas of concern for US intelligence agencies, or ones that originate from American citizens, including a vast quantity of Facebook and Twitter posts, some stating political opinions. Among the details collected are the web addresses of targeted posts, as well as other background details on the authors which provide further confirmation of their origins from American citizens.

Source: https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2017/11/vast-archive-from-pentagon-intel-gathering-operation-left-open-on-amazon/


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  • (Score: 5, Funny) by Justin Case on Monday November 20 2017, @04:14PM (8 children)

    by Justin Case (4239) on Monday November 20 2017, @04:14PM (#599278) Journal

    But we can trust them with the keys to everyone's crypto, because tax funded people are pure of heart, and everyone else is probably a criminal if we can just get the proof.

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  • (Score: 1, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Monday November 20 2017, @04:58PM

    by Anonymous Coward on Monday November 20 2017, @04:58PM (#599289)

    Can't wait to see the file on Anonymous Coward.

  • (Score: 5, Funny) by DannyB on Monday November 20 2017, @05:06PM (6 children)

    by DannyB (5839) Subscriber Badge on Monday November 20 2017, @05:06PM (#599294) Journal

    Nothing to see here is right! This is simply the government trying to be transparent with our data.

    --
    People today are educated enough to repeat what they are taught but not to question what they are taught.
    • (Score: 3, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Monday November 20 2017, @07:26PM (1 child)

      by Anonymous Coward on Monday November 20 2017, @07:26PM (#599346)

      people, this is *funny*, this is NOT informative!

      • (Score: 2, Funny) by Anonymous Coward on Monday November 20 2017, @07:33PM

        by Anonymous Coward on Monday November 20 2017, @07:33PM (#599351)

        Porque no los dos?

    • (Score: 2) by frojack on Monday November 20 2017, @08:54PM (3 children)

      by frojack (1554) on Monday November 20 2017, @08:54PM (#599385) Journal

      government trying to be transparent

      You may be more correct than you think.

      A contractor, failing to set a privacy bit while pushing data to the cloud to allow access from multiple locations, can claim it was a simple mistake. It probably WAS a simple oversight.
      Even if he/she was outraged by what they saw, it doesn't raise to the level of a crime, simply a technical error - incompetence at worst.

      Besides, there is no indication any of this data was actually private, nor any indication the data required any special access beyond a web crawling public websites. No indication of clandestine acquisition, so the data probably can't be considered secret in any way. Just "scraped online posts", something you can do yourself.

      Snowden was a contractor too.
      We need more contractors!!

      --
      No, you are mistaken. I've always had this sig.
      • (Score: 3, Interesting) by edIII on Monday November 20 2017, @09:38PM (1 child)

        by edIII (791) on Monday November 20 2017, @09:38PM (#599416)

        something you can do yourself.

        I don't believe that's an excuse, because all of the actors you mention are not equal. There is a big huge difference between what I can do, and what the NSA/CIA/FBI can do. It's not cheap either. I would need to operate a few servers for scraping, the bandwidth required for it, and then the requisite sophistication to code complex algorithms that can review and rank all of the material. Finding the needles in the haystacks so to speak.

        As a single actor, without the extreme power levels of the NSA/CIA/FBI, I simply do not have the resources to adequately "do it yourself". That is the problem. The differing power levels are unacceptable, and at the very least, need to greatly caution us against the government analyzing citizen's communications. That is regardless of whether or not the communications were public to begin with.

        We cannot abide actors of these power levels, having that much power in the first place. It's inherently dangerous, and even more so when the top level actors don't give two shits about *anyone* at the bottom. Government needs to be kept small, blind, impartial, and representative of our collective interests. It's absolutely none of those things right now. To allow them the ability to perform mass analysis of all the public data is extraordinarily troublesome, when they're so damn anti-American.

        --
        Technically, lunchtime is at any moment. It's just a wave function.
        • (Score: 1, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday November 21 2017, @03:13AM

          by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday November 21 2017, @03:13AM (#599502)

          I guess America is in a bad snit with several other governments, and we can no longer count on the distances of ocean travel to dissuade those pissed off at us from having their revenge.

          The halcyon days of it taking several weeks of travel, along with not being able to carry much cargo, to reach our shores - are gone.

          Advances in travel and technology has paved the way of wreaking lots of havoc from far away. And its rapidly getting worse as our Congress keeps mandating technological ignorance among our own people to keep us under the thumb of "rightsholders" who see our ignorance of controlling these machines to be their key to enforcement of their business model. Problem is by doing so, we render ourselves completely vulnerable to cyber vandalism as others use those very same business enforcement tools to carry out their "business model", which could even include a complete shutdown of all systems running the congressionally mandated code.

          So, we react with lots of security theater, and fear, and a lot of our resources diverted to the illusion of security.

          To me, security is knowing I built my fireplace out of the proper firebrick and construction techniques. Security theater is having a bunch of uniformed men standing guard, saluting, giving reports, and standing by with buckets of water - just in case my wooden fireplace catches fire. This is how I perceive the Congress of the United States legislating how fireplaces are to be built. Vulnerable, so that chosen people can have high-paying jobs keeping everyone scared the fire is going to get out of control if they don't have their hand in it.

          So, now we spend a helluva lotta time watching all the communications to see if anyone is discussing coming over here and screwing up our systems. We know we deliberately designed them to honor remote administration, but we are all on edge knowing that if anyone shares the access code, strangers and people with hostile intent will have the power to lock us out of our own house, shut down our cars, and only God knows what else. While ignorance is not bliss, its quite profitable to the ones in the know, and extremely risky to the ones not in the know.

      • (Score: 3, Funny) by DannyB on Monday November 20 2017, @10:41PM

        by DannyB (5839) Subscriber Badge on Monday November 20 2017, @10:41PM (#599428) Journal

        so the data probably can't be considered secret in any way. Just "scraped online posts", something you can do yourself.

        So this is way worse than a breach of national security, this rises to the level of a TOS violation of a social media site!

        --
        People today are educated enough to repeat what they are taught but not to question what they are taught.